Real-Time Traffic Flow Pattern Matching to Improve Predictive Performance of Online Simulation-Based Dynamic Traffic Assignment

In real-time simulation-based dynamic traffic assignment, selection of the most suitable demand from the library of demands calibrated offline improves the accuracy of the prediction. In the era of data explosion, relying on contextual and rule-based pattern matching logic does not seem sufficient. A rolling horizon scheme for real-time pattern matching is introduced using two pattern matching frameworks. The hard matching algorithm chooses the closest pattern at each evaluation interval, while soft matching calculates the probability of being a match for each pattern. To make sure the pattern switch does not happen because of short-lived interruptions in traffic conditions, a persistency index is introduced. The results show that the number of switches in hard matching is bigger than soft matching but the error of real-time matching for both cases is low. The importance of the results is twofold: First, any observation that is not similar to only one pattern in the library can be mimicked using multiple available patterns; second, more advanced algorithms can match the patterns existing in the library, without any contextual logics for pattern matching.